During the third quarter, Samsung sold 56.3 million smartphones, giving it a global market share of 31.3 percent. Apple only sold 26.9 million iPhones in the same quarter. The Samsung Galaxy S III alone accounted for 18-20 million shipments from July to September.

While Samsung did well in the smartphone department, particularly with its Galaxy line of devices, it didn't do so hot in chip sales. The chip division dropped 28 percent to $1 billion USD.

Samsung rocked a healthy profit overall this quarter, but many worry that the electronics maker won't see this amount of money rolling in next year as the smartphone market continues to grow competitive.

In fact, Samsung's profit is expected to grow 16 percent next year -- down from this year's predictions of 73 percent.

Samsung has other strong businesses, like tablets and OLED TVs, but analysts say these sectors aren't quite ready to sell the way that Galaxy is selling.

Samsung's tablets, in particular, haven't been able to keep up with the like of the iPad and Kindle Fire. Now, with the iPad Mini and Windows 8 tablets making a fresh appearance into the market (not to mention Google's Nexus 7 and a refreshed Kindle Fire HD line has made its way into the market), Samsung seems to continuously fall behind.

Samsung also took a hard hit with tablets due to its patent war with Apple. Apple worked pretty hard to ban Samsung's smartphones and tablets around the world, and successfully accomplished this in countries like Germany and Australia. Samsung launched a few lawsuits of its own regarding 3G patents, and was also able to lift the ban on its Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Australia in December 2011. However, Samsung wasn't so lucky in Germany, where the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is still banned.

Back in August, a jury in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California reached an unfavorable verdict for Samsung, saying that the South Korean electronics maker was guilty of violating technology patents. In other words, most of Samsung's smartphones and tablets in question were found guilt of copying Apple's iPhone and iPad designs. It was ordered to pay $1.05 billion in damages to Apple.

Earlier this week, Samsung Display decided to cut ties with Apple, saying it will no longer ship LCDs to Apple next year. Its LCD shipments to Apple have been cut more and more over time due to Apple wanting huge discounts, but the recent patent infringement drama couldn't have helped either.

More recently, an ITC judge found that Samsung violated four Apple patents, including the flat front face with wider borders at the top and bottom, the lozenge-shaped speaker about the display screen; the translucent images for applications displayed on the screen, and the device's ability to detect when a headset is plugged in.

Samsung did get a little bit of relief in the UK, though, when a judge ordered Apple to post a notice on its UK site that Samsung didn't copy the iPad. Apple complied, but in a very snarky way.

Not wanting to defend Google, but they make more than enough money. The consumer operations side subsidies the Enterprise area, where they have historically been weaker versus MS. Android ties into their overall Enterprise and home user strategy. You use a Google Chrome book in the office, (wearing your Google Glasses obviously) writing Google docs and storing them on your Google Drive in the cloud, using Google Maps to navigate to your client meeting, then have a teleconference using your Gmail with Google Voice and everybody else is using Android Phones or Nexus tablets to remotely connect, with what you are typing instantly translated in realtime by Google Translate. It gains in their ecosystem's growth and helps to monetize their investment in Cloud computing and all those colossal data centers.

The Android OS offers Google an ability to track you wherever you go, (to help improve their traffic mapping amongst other things) harvest your usage data to sell to marketers, use you to improve their services and to lock you in, should it wish, to its future technologies. They probably even record the voice searches and speech to text you dictate and use this to build up an overall profile on you. They have done this all legally because the disclaimer in their all-in-one terms of usage which you didn't read properly and just approved, allows them to. In the same way Apple want you to use iCloud and Apple maps, free services which pay Apple big-time in the data which they report back. This provides lock in to an ecosystem, and allows you to sell more to a captive market.

If Google really wanted to kill the iPhone it would simply stop iPhone users and Safari browsers from using any Google service and watch people change phones and Macs overnight. That would be an evil move for sure, but who is to say what the cause of the greater good is? I'm not sure the arbiter should be Google, which is after all beholden to its shareholders.

Don't bother... He doesn't understand the concept of investment, or synergy as it relates to a business. Either that or he is just being obstinate as it serves his agenda.

It's not making money right now as observed via the internet so thats a fact. LOL. By that standard, Apple should have closed the doors in the late 90's as they werent making money either. Oh, wait, they invested, developed products and then mad money later with a group of synergistic product lines. Wow, kind of like a business plan.